High Country News recently reported on how residents within the city limits of White Salmon, Washington, have lacked free mail delivery from the United States Postal Service for years now. The agency also does not provide free post office boxes for those residents. High Country News’ reporting also revealed that at least 10 other towns in Washington, Oregon and Idaho also lack both free home mail delivery and free PO boxes provided by the USPS. Meanwhile, White Salmon Mayor Marla Keethler has been trying to no avail since 2020 to work with the agency to create a new mail delivery route or provide free PO boxes.
Susan Shain is a freelance journalist based in White Salmon. She joins us to share more details of her recent reporting.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Some residents in White Salmon, Washington and Cascade Locks, Oregon, in addition to at least nine other Northwest towns, do not get home delivery from the U.S. Postal Service and they don’t get free PO boxes – meaning they have to pay for a service that other people get for free. Local and state elected officials have been trying to change this, but so far to no avail.
Susan Shain wrote about this recently for High Country News and joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Susan Shain: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Miller: Could we start by having you tell us the story of Lisa Balsiger-Vargas?
Shain: Yeah. Lisa is a resident of White Salmon. She’s lived there her whole life. She actually still lives in the same home she grew up in, and she’s never gotten mail to her home. She has like a multi-generational PO box. Her parents had the same PO box, now she has the same PO box, and she shares it with her sister and her children. She is on a fixed income. She’s disabled due to long COVID and she has to pay over $200 a year to have a PO box to get mail, to vote. It’s definitely a financial burden for her.
Miller: You note something really surprising, which is that she lives less than a mile from the Post Office. So why doesn’t she just get delivery?
Shain: Nobody within the city limits of White Salmon gets mail delivery, and that is not super rare in small towns. I’ve lived in some other small towns in the West that don’t have mail delivery either. But the thing is, in those kinds of situations, the USPS is supposed to offer free PO boxes to people. In White Salmon and some other towns across the Gorge, it’s not doing that.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for how widespread this is in the Northwest? I mean, in what other cities do people who live inside city limits actually have to pay for PO boxes?
Shain: It’s really hard to know exactly. I asked the Postal Service this question, but I didn’t get a response, so I ended up using social media – Reddit, Facebook – to try to figure out how widespread this issue is. And then just calling a bunch of post offices. From what I could confirm, there’s at least 10 communities that I found in Washington, Oregon and Idaho that are facing this issue. It seems like the Gorge has a pretty high concentration. So in the Gorge I found that it applied to Bingen, Carson, Lyle, Stevenson and Underwood in Washington, and then also Cascade Locks in Oregon. There’s some other communities in Washington and Oregon as well, but those are the ones in the Gorge.
Miller: You’re talking about people inside various city limits. What happens for folks who live outside of cities?
Shain: So people who are outside the city limits, they do get mail service in these situations. They are on what’s called a rural carrier route. Those are people who are hired by the Post Office. They’re not wearing a uniform and driving the little Postal truck that you picture. They’re driving a regular car out to these rural roads and delivering mail that way. So I have friends who live outside of White Salmon city limits and they get mail to their house, but I live inside of White Salmon city limits and I don’t.
Miller: How do you think about the added cost – for Lisa, who you were mentioning earlier, it’s over $200 a year – in the context just of voting, of Oregon and Washington’s vote-by-mail systems?
Shain: Yeah, it’s pretty wild, right? I mean, the cost for Lisa, she’s had this PO box forever, and since at least 2018, the cost has more than doubled. She, like I said, is on a fixed income, so she’s paying over $200 a year to have the right to vote in a state like Washington.
Miller: Now, I want to turn to the federal rules here because as you said, the Postal Service is supposed to provide free access to PO boxes for people who do not get home delivery. What exactly does the statute say here?
Shain: I mean, that basically is what the statute says. It says if you’re not eligible for mail delivery, then you should be qualified for these what’s called Group E PO boxes and you should be able to get the smallest PO box for free. There’s a lot of other places where that has happened. The free PO boxes do cost the agency about $39 million a year. But there’s been other towns throughout the West where they haven’t been receiving free PO boxes. Buena Vista, Colorado actually protested. Then another town in Idaho, Ketchum, Idaho, they enlisted the help of their state legislators, so they eventually were able to get this kind of designation and get these free PO boxes for their residents. We just haven’t had luck yet.
Miller: You had a quote from the mayor of White Salmon, Marla Keethler, who said that she’s been going around and around with the Postal Service and it’s been a “hair-pulling experience.” What has she been trying to do?
Shain: Mayor Marla, as we like to call her in White Salmon, she was elected in 2020, and she’s been working on this for the past six years. There’s also evidence of this having been an issue … I found news stories of this from back in 2009, so it’s been ongoing for decades here. But she’s been working with our postmaster in White Salmon. She’s been emailing with the higher ups at the agency, but it seems like it’s two steps forward, one step back.
There’s always a different person that she has to communicate with, and then they’re confused about what’s going on, and they want her to start at the beginning. It just kind of seems like they’re suggesting all these different things to her and different solutions, and then something else changes and they say, “actually that’s not going to work.”
Miller: How does this fight for free PO boxes fit into the larger fiscal crisis that the Postal Service is facing right now?
Shain: I couldn’t get the Postal Service to comment on anything. They actually told me to file a public records request if I wanted more information. They didn’t tell me outright what this has to do with it, but yeah, the Postal Service is definitely facing a massive fiscal crisis. Like earlier this year, they weren’t sure if they were gonna have enough money to make it through the year because the Postal Service doesn’t actually take any taxpayer dollars. So it’s a totally self-funded agency. It makes its money by the stamps we buy, etc. Because people are sending a lot less letter mail, they have a lot less revenue right now. One could speculate that that might be one of the reasons they don’t wanna offer free PO boxes, but they wouldn’t tell me that and they wouldn’t give me the information outright.
Miller: If the thinking is that the Postal Service – which does not have enough money now to cover its operating costs – if it doesn’t want to spend money on people in rural areas unless it’s somehow forced to, who would do that forcing?
Shain: That’s a great question. Like I said, some of the towns that have had success have gotten their state legislators involved. It seems like that may be the way to go in this situation, just to kind of put pressure on the agency. The Postal Service does have this thing called a Universal Service Obligation. That means that they’re supposed to provide affordable mail service to everybody no matter where they live. And that service is also supposed to be uniform, which means that people who are living in rural areas shouldn’t be paying more than people who are living in cities. It doesn’t really seem like the postal service is living up to that mandate right now.
Miller: Susan, thanks very much.
Shain: Thank you.
Miller: Susan Shain is a freelance journalist based in White Salmon, Washington. You can read her article about the town of White Salmon and other Northwest cities in the most recent issue of High Country News or online.
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